“In the company’s communications with education buyers late last month, Apple said that schools will still be able to purchase Mac OS 9 hardware in 2003. While Apple’s new hardware models will next year boot into Mac OS X only, the company now plans to offer certain configurations to the education market that will boot into OS 9.” Read the full article at Think Secret.
Ha ha,
That’s because they didn’t tell you that OSX is a big slow pig of BSD Unix with a candy coating, and can’t run on 80% of hardware that schools have!
I can see Linux making serious in-roads here, and watch out for OSBOS next year, which will run on that old hardware, and make it screeeeeeeeem =)
Ganted, the educational apps are not their, but hey, by then most educational material will be on the Internet anyway, so it won’t matter.
my $0.02
Apple is pushing hard to make people move to OS X. But forgot that one of their main markets – US educational system – needs help to make the move. Can I say dumbness?
The right strategy to push people to OS X is to have software available on OS X only.
Today games/apps are able to run X / classic. A majority is classic the minority being X only. By making that move apple tries to push developers to go X only. The real solution would be to push the developers and that would push the users.
—
http://homepage.mac.com/sofdtkid
Apple sold the IIe until what, 1993, just because schools had so much legacy software. Good move to keep the bit of the academic market they’ve got. The school district where my mother works just went homogeneous Win2k. *sigh* Some enterprising middle schooler will r00t ’em soon enough. 🙂
BTW, if you dig old Apple hardware, school/county auctions are a *great* place to pick some up. I got 24 IIgs’s for ten dollars last summer. I’m tryin’ to get rid of some of them, as I only wanted three. 🙂
Schools right now have a lot invested in software that will not run well on OSX. So they will still support OS9. To me that is a smart move. You don’t isolate the customers who want to buy the new hardware and run the old OS.
They should do that for all the machines.
As for linux making inroads into education.. Doubt it.
Until you can get Linux people to do the IT work for FREE then schools are going to use either Apple/Microsoft.
Every one compains about OS X being slow. Part of the reason is the hardware has to be compatable with OS 9. By dumping OS 9 support, they can also remove the 4MB of ROM needed for OS 9 and redesign the hardware to be more OS X friendly. Expect the new hardware to be cheaper and faster. The changes can be masked from the Clasic enviroment since the Clasic runtime can be modified to include the missing ROM.
Anyone miss the BASIC language and audio tape support that would start if their PC was turned on without a bootable drive? I’m still wondering when the PC went DOS only…
This announcement is not just for education… it has nothing to do with education as a matter of fact. The decision came after Apple and Quark made a deal to extend OS 9 booting for Apple’s graphic professionals because Quark isn;t yet finished porting Xpress to OS X.
If Apple’s education customers benefited from the deal as well, all the better, but it wasn’t an arangement made for education.
(zykes, you are a troll)
Apple still doesn’t have a good system in place for OS X that can match the functionality of Macintosh Manager. Until they do, OS9 is going to be the choice for schools.
“As for linux making inroads into education.. Doubt it.
Until you can get Linux people to do the IT work for FREE then schools are going to use either Apple/Microsoft.”
And as far as you knowing what your talking about, I doubt that. I suggest you Google “Linux in Schools” and pay particular attention to the state of Oregon.
Oh and look at this too:
http://www.seul.org/edu/
http://www.k12ltsp.org/
http://k12linux.org/contents.html
http://www.k12os.org/
etc… etc.. etc.. The list goes on my friend.
when our educational system can’t use the same OS we expect average everyday home users to use. I thought our educational system was supposed to be educating us. They’re holding us back! They kicked me out of their library because I knew too much about their computer network (in 2 different highschools). So now I’m a sys admin, building and managing networks much more complex without any of their help. Then the rest of you pull your money out of the stock market and dry up half the companies I could have worked for. But that’s cool, cuz I paid off my debt. So now after my trek through our wonderful education system and job market with so many opportunities I’m ready to work at Taco Bell and write free software.
They want OS9? Take away their computers, they don’t know how to use them anyway. They discourage our children to learn, they horde technology that our kids could play with because of their ignorance. If it were up to me I’d do away with our public education system completely. It teaches us nothing we can’t learn from a book or the internet in less time. It confuses children and holds back the bright ones out of jealousy and malice.
When you think you’re kid is a criminal you deserve what you get. Our school system thinks all children are criminals.
By dumping OS 9 support, they can also remove the 4MB of ROM needed for OS 9 and redesign the hardware to be more OS X friendly.
They’re doing it for years now. With the NewWorld architecture (Beige G3 and following), the MacOS ROM resides on the hard disk or boot CD.
It is not OS 9 compatiblity that is slowing OS X down, or how else would you explain the speed of Linux on modern Macintosh hardware?
that this discussion is going to get nasty?
When people assume educational apps on mac arent important its pretty obvious they never worked in a school using them.
Anyway… retraining costs for teachers, administration, it, etc would be either too great, or too time consuming. I was wondering how apple was gonna make schools switch, heh.
C:
What school system are you talking about? This is a mulitnational forum, if you are going to rant, at least tell us what school system you are talking about, certainly not the U.S. as a whole as it would be impossible to lump the entire public school system into one entity.
Eugenia, any mod’ing necessary here? This is way OT…
a troll that rhymes with yikes. really now, at least have the balls to admit you’ve never even used it.
even tho c’s comments seem like they are written by someone who needs to put down the bong for a little while. I will attest that the public school systems I have dealt with have been frightenly backwards as far as technology.
One district I worked for for years, teachers refused to get trained, refused to use computer period, even though the district needed them to use them.
All student training/work using technology was basically lessons in advanced web surfing, and modified babysitting. No one in the adminsitration recongnized the need to teach the (geek kids mostly) the skills they were *craving*; linux, python, perl, web applications, etc. It was nothing short of pathetic. On a good note, the district was somewhat open to using open source software, even tho Apple kept giving them awards, and fluffing their feathers making them believe that they were a leader in the technology in education, blah blah.
So Apple of course was not hip to linux and tried to downplay it to the suits.
But see, none of this mattered, because finding people who would work for the $600 a month they paid to tech support people, the turn around was amazing, and there was no coherence or continutity to the way things were handled.
This was a large district, who continually wins awards for tech leadership.
And since my MO is usually to bring linux to school districts, I get to see a lot of this.
I agree with Mickey. It is Quark that has been the hold up. For awhile there, Apple was even bundling InDesign with Power Macs to help get things rolling.
In education, there is no pressing problem, at least regarding OS X. Even if they did not boot into OS 9, Apple still planned to have Classic, so that OS 9 apps could still be used.
spider, Eugenia is gone – yesterday was her last day as Editor.
i know that that was sort of off-topic…but being a student i have to agree with you…i’m currently working on a network administration degree…and i would agree that they really do not teach us anything that we cannot teach ourselves more efficiently…i would go so far as to say that college teaches us how we can most efficiently use the system to our advantage by lying, cheating, stealing, and doing more with less…and some of the prerequisites sound good on paper, but in reality we forget those things that they cram down our throats against our will and we teach ourselves those things that interest us anyways
just my thoughts on the american education system
-bytes256
Please explain how my comments on OSX and the US public school system were not related to this topic.
There are no excuses. Your teachers don’t know how to use computers? Hire more educated teachers. Can’t afford it? Tax parents more so their kids can get the proper education. System doesn’t work? Well, I’ve been saying that for years, but no one seems to listen. And that’s fine, just fix these problems and stop making excuses and you won’t have to listen to me bitch.
I’d work for free. Hell I’d even be a teacher if I felt like anyone in America cared about eachother and wanted to work together to build a country and community for Americans. But we would rather work for ourselves, lay off people to try to make our stock price look good, etc. Our educational system is simply one of the many consequences of our actions. Deal with it!
But don’t cater to stupidity and ignorance, it only makes you look more stupid than you really are.
c, I always used to say, “Whatever befalls _______ district is by their own doing….”
Man what a mess..
Yeah OS X runs slower than OS 9. But for many of you this means nothing cause you don’t use Mac’s, but for those who have used Classic OS’s, you know how frustrating it is when your Mp3 players skips when your listening to music and browsing the web. And when your moving/copying files, you have to wait for that process to finish before you can do anything else.
OS 9 has problems with multi-tasking, OS X still needs to be optimized. Taking the OS 9 core and ripping it apart would be hell. Especially since it’s design was flawed. Before you insult one, remember to look at the flaws of the alternative.
I’m interested in the part about Apple sending people on-site to education software developers to push the OS X case. Would these people be developers themselves, or money/legal pushy types?
Thanks, but no thanks Apple.
We prefer not to be patronised by BigBucks Corp, and wish to bring the kid sup on new interesting and relevant operatign systems.
t
: New, interesting and relevant OSes…
What new, interesting, relevant OSes, pray tell? BeOS?
There haven’t been many new, interesting, relevant OSes since 1987.
Thanks for the sites
BTW These websites don’t even work
http://www.k12ltsp.org/
http://k12linux.org/contents.html
http://www.k12os.org/
This one did
http://www.seul.org/edu/
and I invite everyone to check the page out and make their own judgement.
I did look at it and guess what. Most are not being used by the students. It was used as a Webserver, or mail server or router or firewall. Some of them were students talking about their own workstation.
So far I found 5 schools using linux for their students
This is inroads into education?
I suggest people just check around their local school system and see whats running.
To get Linux into the classroom it will cost a lost of money in retraining and administration costs that schools just do not have..
You need to retrain the administrators
You need to retrain the teachers
Or you need really dedicated people who will do this for FREE. It’s cheaper to pay Microsoft or Apple for the stupid licences and get any joe blow who knows microsoft / mac then it would to find a Linux guy to come in and run the systems.
Now back to the topic.. Apple needs to support OS9 because schools cannot just retrain all their people into OSX and they don’t have the money to repurchase all the software